Family Says India Rape Suspect’s Death Was Not Suicide

By HEATHER TIMMONS and NIHARIKA MANDHANA

March 11, 2013

NEW DELHI — The case of a fatal gang rape aboard a bus here in December, which set off an uproar across India, took a surprising turn on Monday when the body of a suspect in the attack was found hanging from a bedsheet noose in his jail cell. Officials called the death a suicide, but the suspect’s family insisted that he had been killed.

The suspect, Ram Singh, was accused of being the driver of the bus in which a 23-year-old woman was beaten and raped. The woman had severe internal injuries from being sexually assaulted with an iron rod.

Mr. Singh was found at 5:45 a.m. hanging from a bedsheet rope suspended from a ceiling grille, jail officials said. An investigation was under way, they said.

“It is a major lapse in security — certainly it is not a small incident,” India’s home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, said at a news conference in New Delhi.

But Mr. Singh’s family and his lawyer said that he would not have been able to tie a noose, because his right arm had been seriously damaged in a bus accident. In addition, they said, he shared his cell in the Tihar prison complex with several inmates, making it difficult to believe he could have hanged himself without being noticed.

“I suspect there is foul play,” the lawyer, V. K. Anand, said. “There were no circumstances for committing suicide. His mental state was stable, the trial was going well, he was meeting with his family. I can’t understand why he would commit suicide.”

Some family members said Mr. Singh had been abused in jail.

“It is not suicide; he has been hanged by the police,” his father, Mangilal, said in an interview. He said his son had told him on Friday that the police were beating him in jail and that he was being pressed to change his lawyer.

Earlier Monday, the father told the television channel NewsX that Ram Singh had said other inmates raped him.

Mr. Singh’s brother Mukesh is one of four other men accused in the case, which is being tried in a “fast track” court in South Delhi set up for sexual assault cases. The creation of such courts was a direct result of the uproar over the fatal rape in December, as thousands of people across India, long angered by selective law enforcement and endemic corruption, vented their outrage over failures in preventing and prosecuting crimes against women.

A sixth defendant is being tried as a juvenile. The four men face 13 charges, including rape, robbery and murder — which could carry the death penalty.

Ram Singh, whose job was to transport schoolchildren in the bus, was the first suspect the police apprehended after the attack was reported.

His confession to the police led them to the other suspects.

The police said a group of drunken men, looking for victims to harass, had tricked the young woman and a male friend into getting on the bus, attacked them and then stripped off their clothes and left them on a highway.

Such confessions to the police are not admissible as evidence in India, and Ram Singh had not yet testified in court. The police said that even without his testimony, they had forensic evidence linking the suspects to the woman who was killed and to her companion, who was beaten.

Another of Mr. Singh’s brothers — who asked that his name not be used, to shield him from further news media attention — said by telephone that his brother had shown no suicidal tendencies.

On Friday, Mr. Singh’s parents visited him in jail, the brother said, and he appeared to be calm.